Book reviews

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Trixie Belden – The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace by Kathryn Kenny

I found a copy of the Trixie Belden book, The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace by Kathryn Kenny in an Op Shop so decided to revisit my childhood for the bargain price of $1. For context, that’s 50p for those of you in the UK or 67 cents US.

I remembered some of the characters, including Trixie the girl-detective and her best friend Honey Wheeler. I also remembered Jim, Honey’s adopted brother, who, while it was never explicitly stated, Trixie seemed to have a bit of a crush on. I’d forgotten Trixie’s know-it-all older brother Mart and Miss Trask, Honey’s governess, even though she was the character I most related to this time around!

What I hadn’t remembered, or more likely hadn’t realised as a child, was just how annoying Trixie was. I’ll tell you about Trixie’s tiresome traits later.

The story began with Honey inheriting a necklace of diamonds and pearls, sapphires, emeralds and rubies, a piece so grand that only a Queen could have worn it. Although Honey’s parents had the necklace appraised and the stones were found to be fake, they took all of the characters previously mentioned to London to research the necklace’s history and Honey’s mother’s family tree, which made me wonder, did I really believe that this sort of thing actually happened to other girls when I was a child?

During their visit to London, the Bob-Whites, aka Trixie’s gang, visited the Tower of London, Madame Tussauds, the British Museum and the theatre, where they saw a Shakespearean play.

A pick-pocket tried to steal Honey’s handbag at Madame Tussauds, then Honey was saved by a charming Scotsman from being ran over by a bus at Piccadilly Circus, thus becoming one of the gang. Trixie was suspicious of Gordie McDuff and his motives right away, but you’ll have to read this book for yourself to learn if McDuff and his accent were genuine or if he only wanted to steal Honey’s necklace.

Trixie couldn’t understand why nobody in London seemed to like her and her friends, but I could. She was noisy in public places and often inconsiderate of other people, for example pausing at the entry to a train carriage while trying to decide where they were going, which prevented other commuters ability to get on and off the trains. To add to these sins, Trixie and the Bob-Whites flashed their cash around at a time when most Londoners were probably suffering financial constraints.

Trixie’s overly outgoing personality grated on me and the mystery was predictable, making me wish I’d left this Trixie Belden book behind. If I find a Nancy Drew book, however, I’ll probably give it a go for old time’s sake and hope to enjoy it better.

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Author, Book Review, Kenny - Kathryn

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Daisy Miller by Henry James (#novnov25)

The blurb for Daisy Miller by Henry James is quite specific; it states that Daisy flouts the ‘rigid European social code’ while travelling through Europe and as such, is disapproved of by her fellow American travelers before paying ‘for her indiscretion with her life.’

The story followed Mr. Winterbourne, a young American as he travelled through Switzerland, supposedly paying attention to his rich aunt but otherwise chasing pretty girls. An unnamed narrator told the story, with Daisy’s story told from Mr Winterbourne’s perspective.

By page 43, halfway through the book, I could already tell that the blurb was accurate. It was clear that Daisy either didn’t recognise or care about societal expectations as she raised eyebrows by gadding about unchaperoned with Winterbourne, whom she had met quite casually in Switzerland. Daisy‘s mother seemed too tired out by the antics of Daisy’s younger brother to care what Daisy was up to. Daisy’s father, a businessman, was absent, which seemed to be usual for the family.

By this time I was just as irritated with Daisy‘s behaviour as the society hostesses were who were shunning her. Even I, a reader from 150 years in the future, could see that her free and easy manners and disregard for conventions wouldn’t end happily.

By the end of the book though, my feelings had changed. Daisy did indeed die, and not in the way I’d expected her to, even though the author laid clues earlier in the story about the way she might die. But by then, Mr Winterbourne, who had previously been enamoured of Daisy, had lost respect for her, was fed up with her flirting, and no longer condoned her lack of care for society’s rules. While I’m not 100% convinced that Daisy was so innocent that she simply didn’t see why these conventions existed, I felt angry with Mr Winterbourne for changing his attitude towards her.

I recently came across the expression ‘pretty privilege’ and suspect this applies to the character of Daisy. She was very pretty, beautiful even, which makes me wonder if she might have been able to behave as she did with condemnation if she been less attractive. She was certainly rich enough to almost do what she wanted to. I’m not certain about Daisy’s brains – her conversation didn’t appear to be scintillating, but as everyone knows beauty, wealth and great charm go a long way towards making people seem more intelligent than what they really are.

I don’t know what it is about Henry James. I almost care about his characters – but not quite. His writing is good – but it doesn’t move me. His plots are interesting – but I never remember them after I’ve finished his books. I want to love Henry James’ stories – but I don’t.

For all of these reasons, I’m glad Daisy Miller was a novella rather than a full-blown book.

Daisy Miller has filled two spots for me this month, Novellas in November, hosted by Bookish Beck and Cathy746Books.

Daisy Miller was book twenty-five of my second challenge for The Classics Club, to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

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Author, Book Review, James - Henry

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The Rome Affair by Laura Caldwell

The Rome Affair by Laura Caldwell had me sitting up in bed reading far too late at night from the first chapters. I think this book might have been passed on to me from Aunty G – thanks, Aunty G, if you’re reading this. I’m tired today!

The story is narrated by Rachel Blakely, who along with her husband Nick, a plastic surgeon, live a superficially golden life. They have a beautiful home in Chicago, Rachel enjoys her job in sales, and the couple are trying for a baby. However, despite public perception, other people’s marriages are not always so wonderful in private, and Rachel and Nick have been on fragile ground since Nick admitted to an affair six months ago. Rachel is supportive of Nick’s career and the social aspirations that come with his career, but both come at a cost to her. And, Rachel’s job is shaky, since the company is not making the sales it used to, and Rachel’s own sales are down.

When Rachel is sent to Rome to sell her company’s product, she leaps at the opportunity, taking her best friend Kit with her for a three-day jaunt. Kit is a down on her luck actress, who is supporting her own mother as she goes through expensive treatment for cancer – reading these sorts of books makes me feel so grateful to be Australian, because here, if anyone needs treatment for an illness it is free through Medicare, a universal healthcare system that our taxes pay for it. If any Presidents from countries where people have to pay enormous amounts for health insurance are reading this, I’d suggest your country do the same. I’m sure most voters would rather see more money spent on their population’s health and less on the military.

But, back to the story. Alone at dinner one night in Rome, after Kit ditched Rachel for a handsome Frenchman, Rachel met an Italian man and had a one-night fling with him. Back in Chicago, Kit asked Rachel for a large amount of money to pay for an experimental cancer treatment for her mother. Blackmail? Or a loan? I couldn’t decide, so even though it was already past bedtime by this stage, of course I read on.

The second half of the story was equally as fast-paced, with Rachel’s problems going from bad to worse. There were twists I didn’t see coming, along with turns that I did anticipate. None of the characters behaved particularly well, nor were they likeable although I felt some sympathy towards Rachel, possibly because she had been established as a victim early in the story. She made stupid decisions though, and kept on making them, which tried my patience.

The book’s title and cover are slightly deceptive as although Rachel did have an affair in Rome, neither really gave a fair indication of what to expect from the story. Instead, the title and cover made me think the plot would be some sort of political intrigue, possibly set in the Vatican. I think the story would be better served by a cover showing a woman wearing red high-heeled shoes, or a picture of a restaurant table for two, or something along those lines to better appeal to readers of this book’s genre.

I wouldn’t recommend The Rome Affair to readers of ‘good’ literature, but I was solidly entertained for a few hours.

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Author, Book Review, Caldwell, Laura

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The Road Trip by Tricia Stringer

I bought The Road Trip by Tricia Stringer because I loved the way the cover made me feel. A beach at sunset, comfy chairs to relax in and the dinky old caravan implies a story about a relaxing holiday – seriously, what could possibly go wrong here?

Lots, as it turned out.

Sharyn, who I would describe as slightly high-maintenance, was hoping that her husband Barry was planning to whisk her off to a luxurious and Instagram-worthy island resort for the combination of her 60th birthday and their 35th wedding anniversary, so to say she was disappointed when her husband surprised her by purchasing a caravan and four-wheel drive from an inheritance left to him by his father was an understatement. Worse still, he’d planned for them to spend their upcoming long-service leave on a six-week caravanning trip from Adelaide up to Broome in Top End of Australia in convoy with his mate, Ray, and Ray’s reclusive, odd sister, Kathleen.

Before I get on with telling you a little about what happened next in the story, I’d like to say that if my husband bought a modern caravan with an ensuite, washing machine and all the mod-cons (nothing like the picturesque caravan on the book’s cover) and four-wheel drive combo that set us back around $80,000 to $120,000 without us being in agreement over the purchase, I’d be very, very angry. On a scale on one to ten, my rage levels would have been about twenty, maybe even twenty one or two, even though I enjoy caravanning and camping. In Victoria we need to work for the same company for a little over seven years to build up six weeks of long service leave, and I can well understand that Sharyn didn’t want to spend her hard-earned long-service leave on long, long days of driving, along with the cooking and cleaning and laundry and all the rest of it, which just like at home still needs doing but is far less convenient in a caravan.

From the beginning, the reader realised that Sharyn’s girlfriends were unkind, manipulative and superficial, which left the reader trying to decide whether or not to like Sharyn based on the company she kept. As it turned out, Sharyn’s best friend was Ray’s wife, Julie who died about a year before the story began. Julie had been a good person, but since her death Sharyn had been adrift. The group she was running with were less than impressed by Barry’s surprise too, since their idea of holidays were of glamorous tropical islands, or expensive river cruises, which were taken as much to impress each other with than to enjoy.

Sharyn eventually agreed to the road trip, but from the beginning things went wrong. Barry wasn’t a practical man, and there is more to towing a caravan than people realise. Making sure all of the cupboard doors, fridge and windows are secured before driving off is one of them, and on Sharyn and Barry’s first stop, they opened their caravan door to find the contents of the fridge all over their floor. Weeks later, Sharyn could still smell rank sour cream whenever she stepped inside the van. Once that smell dissipated, the toilet overflowed – yuck, yuck and yuck again.

The chapters alternately followed Sharyn on a holiday she didn’t want to be on, and Kathleen, who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown after giving up her job to nurse her parents, followed soon after by Julie. Kathleen’s finances were somewhat precarious, partly because her father had left the bulk of his estate to Ray, and she was suffering from severe anxiety that was exacerbated by inconsiderate, difficult neighbours who had been making her life a living hell.

I liked Kathleen and wanted good things for her. I wanted her to stand up to her much older brother Ray, who genuinely loved her and was paying her way on the trip, but who expected Kathleen to be his cook, cleaner and maid just because that was the traditional role that his mother and Julie had previously played in his life.

I enjoyed watching Kathleen gain confidence as the story continued, and that she and Sharyn eventually became friends. Sharyn also became a better person as the story progressed, in part because she began stepping up to advocate for Kathleen to prevent Ray from walking all over her, or to comfort her when events triggered a meltdown.

Ray and Barry also learned things about themselves and grew as a result of the experiences they shared on this trip. What I didn’t like about the two men though was their selfishness, which became more obvious when they were together. They often left Sharyn and Kathleen to manage the cooking, cleaning, planning, even though Sharyn always asked/suggested/nagged Barry contribute, which of course she shouldn’t have to. In addition, the men almost always dumped the emotional load of whatever was going on onto the two women to cope with.

The story had a few faults, nothing major – just little annoyances. For instance, I’d have liked to have known where Sharyn worked and what she actually did there. Barry, too. Just a line or two to say who they were and what they did in the greater part of their usual lives would have sufficed.

Sharyn and Barry had regular glitches and petty arguments that would have been resolved by a two-sentence conversation, which interfered with me believing in them as a couple. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that married people bicker and quarrel, but I didn’t always believe in Shazza and Bazza’s arguments. They had been married for 35 years, so I was left thinking that most of their issues only existed in the story as plot devices.

My last bone-to-pick is with the blurb on the back cover, which led me to believe that the story included a murder mystery. Without saying why, I’ll just say that the murder mystery element of the story shouldn’t have been included in the blurb.

However, sometimes you just need a fast, happy read and that’s what I got with The Road Trip. I knew that cheerful, summery cover wouldn’t let me down.

My purchase of The Road Trip by Tricia Stringer continues my New Year’s resolution for 2025 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of the year (October). I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool on Love Your Bookshop Day.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Stringer - Tricia

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The Tightrope Men by Desmond Bagley

I really enjoyed the first half of The Tightrope Men by Desmond Bagley with its James Bond-vibe, but the second half dragged after getting bogged down in a complicated Cold War espionage mission.

The story began with Giles Denison, an widowed Englishman, having gone to bed drunk in his own home the night before, waking up one morning in a strange room not knowing how he got there. When Denison looked in the mirror he got an even bigger shock, since the face looking back at him wasn’t his own. He soon discovered he was in a hotel in Oslo, Norway, and that the people around him knew him as a Finnish scientist and engineer, Dr Meyrick.

Denison soon realised he had been kidnapped and while in a coma, surgery to change his face to look like Meyrick’s had been performed. As Denison tried to figure out why this had happened and who had done it to him, he played along at being Meyrick, fooling everyone he met. Eventually, though, he sought help from the British authorities, then he found himself in the midst of a spy novel.

Things got weird when Meyrick’s daughter turned up, because the real Meyrick was an angry, mean father, but the new, improved version was the type of man who a daughter could fall in love with … ugh. The next thing was, Denison and the daughter (who still didn’t know that the man who looked like her father was someone else), along with a pack of spies and double agents crossed over into Finland then Russia, on the hunt for some old papers that Meyrick had buried in his garden many years ago. The papers were designs for some sort of evil weaponry that I couldn’t understand – much like a Bond film.

The Tightrope Men was written in 1973, and although it wasn’t as sexist and racist as it could have been, some aspects of the story were dated – and that’s aside from the father-daughter thing. I’m too young to remember the Cold War, so didn’t find that aspect of the story as frightening as contemporary reader might have found the book back in the day, but there were certainly thrills galore.

I’ve passed this book on to Uncle A, and suspect that because he is the right age to remember the Cold War, he might enjoy The Tightrope Men better than I did.

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Author, Bagley - Desmond, Book Review

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All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman

I’ve been looking out for All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman since reading Karissa’s intriguing review of this book.

Book Review: All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman

The title is terrifically apt, since all of the other mothers at an exclusive English boy’s school do, at the very least, dislike Florence Grimes, who is American, self-obsessed, morally bankrupt, unreliable, and a terrible mother to ten-year old Dylan. Florence wasn’t particularly fond of any of the other mothers either, and saw them as rich snobs jostling amongst themselves for their own social positions, all the while looking down on her and Dylan. Florence’s drinking and partying, and her attractiveness to their husbands didn’t help.

Before Dylan was born, Florence was the lead singer in a girl-band, but was outed from the band just before they made it big. Dylan’s father Will was the band’s manager, and he paid for Dylan to go to St Angeles. Perhaps not surprisingly, the other children bullied Dylan, who seemed to be mildly autistic.

The story really got going when a boy from Dylan’s school, Alfie Risby, went missing during a school excursion. Alfie was one of Dylan’s bullies, and recently, Dylan had lashed out at Alfie because Alfie had been tormenting an animal. Or, so Dylan said. Florence was always going to believe her own son over anything that Alfie or the teachers or the other mothers, said. Later, though, Florence realised that Dylan had brought home Alfie’s school backpack the day he went missing and had hidden it under his bed.

Instead of demanding answers, Florence packed Dylan off to his father’s house for a week, then went looking for answers with Jenny, another American mother, who either didn’t know enough about Florence or didn’t care about the pecking order at St Angeles enough to avoid her.

In between dreaming of a professional comeback to rival Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi, Florence drank too much, had one-night stands with unsuitable men, used drugs, flirted and made use of her upstairs neighbour, forgot to feed Dylan’s pet turtle, unearthed several mysteries to do with Alfie’s disappearance before framing an innocent man, then realised Dylan was in danger and went all-in to save him.

Florence was one of the most unlikeable characters I’ve ever met, and if she was a real person I would steer well-clear of her, as well as making sure she was never alone with my husband, yet this story was completely engaging. Despite all of her flaws, Florence would clearly do anything to protect her son.

The book’s last chapter raised questions that might be answered if there is a second book to feature Florence and her new friend Jenny.

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Author, Book Review, Harman - Sarah

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Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Well, I can see why Orbital by Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize.

Orbital is a slender book, a novella really, and the plot is also very slight, and yet it is also the story of the whole world. Despite being only 135 pages long, I took almost a week to read the book, since I wanted to think about the ideas presented and investigate all sorts of interesting questions that the book prompted.

The story follows a team of six people orbiting the earth at low earth altitude over a single day on an international space station. The reader gets the tiniest of glimpses into the lives of the characters, who are astronauts and cosmonauts from Japan, Russia, the USA, Italy and Great Britain, as they go about their day, along with teensy peeks into their lives back on earth. One of the women had just received the news that her mother had died and one of the men worried about friends from the Philippines as he and his colleagues watched a super-typhoon developing in south-east Asia. Another man thought about his wife, as another women exchanged her daily photos with her husband on his sheep farm in Ireland. All of the astronauts wished they could go to the moon, as they sent their best wishes to another group of astronauts who were on their way there. One of the women wanted to go to Mars, even though such a trip would take her away from her family and Earth for many years.

The real star of the show, though, was the earth itself; coastlines and snow capped mountain ranges, obscuring clouds and the varieties of blues that comprise the sea, arid red deserts and the lights of Europe, Asia and the United States at night. The ever-rotating view of the earth, with 16 sunrises every 24 hours on the space station, equating to a new day dawning every 90 minutes.

I was constantly amazed by facts about space, space stations, the work done on space stations, and the type of people who are passionate about space, all of which were thrown in to the story as if they were ordinary pieces of information. I suppose these facts were ordinary for the characters but they were amazing to me, and interspersed within the dreamlike quality of the writing, especially the characters’ thoughts and conversations, combined to make Orbital one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read.

I was often sidetracked looking up interesting things that arose from the characters. For example, one of the astronauts carried a postcard of the painting, Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies-in-Waiting’ by Diego Valaquez with him to space because his wife had been the girl sitting next to him in art class at school when he studied the painting. I fell down a rabbit-hole looking at the painting, then reading up on the painting’s meaning. Towards the end of the story one of the characters suggested a meaning that makes perfect sense, yet for all my gazing at the painting when mention of it first arose, the idea he suggested hadn’t even occurred to me.

The next rabbit-hole I fell down was looking at videos of earth from the International Space Station (ISS), which circles Earth from approximately 400 kilometres (250 miles) altitude, 16 times per day. At present, there are seven astronauts onboard from multiple countries. You can watch from a camera attached to the outside of the space station here.

Readers who prefer strong plots might not like Orbital as much as I did, but I liked it enough that I intend to buy a copy to keep in my bookcase since the copy I read was from the library. I think this book would make a delightful audiobook because of the poetical language, but be prepared to hit pause while investigating any number of curiousities.

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Author, Book Review, Harvey - Samantha

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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

By my usual prudish standards, the story of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan should have offended me, but the surprising beauty of the writing kept me reading. I chose this book because the film is often shown on Australian television and knowing nothing about the plot other than it being the story of two newlyweds, I wanted to read the book before watching the film.

On Chesil Beach tells the story of Edward and Florence, starting on their wedding night at a hotel on England’s Dorset coast in 1962.

The first sentence explained they were young, serious and virgins. As they ate their supper, the thought of what would happen next in the four-poster bed, which they could see from their sitting room, left Edward panting with excitement and Florence quailing with anxiety and fear.

While they ate their roast beef with sodden boiled vegetables drowned in flour-thickened gravy, the story went to and from their present to their past, describing the Elizabethan farmhouse that had been ‘georgianised’ many years ago to become the hotel on Chesil Beach where they were staying on their wedding night, the sounds of the patrons in the hotel bar below, and the awkwardness of the boys serving them their meal, to Edward and Florence’s pasts, individually and as a couple. Florence was a violinist who lived for her music, the child of a well-off businessman and a bluestocking, while Edward was a teacher’s child, poor, and had a mother who was brain-damaged. They had met by accident at a meeting to protest bombs, which sounded very earnest in a 1960s-way. After they became engaged, Florence’s father gave Edward, who dreamed of writing short biographies about semi-obscure men who were the right-hand men of great men, a job as a salesman in his business.

By the half-way point of the book, dinner was finished and Florence, summoning her courage, led Edward to the bedroom, and took off her soft, pale blue leather shoes, ‘with low heels and a tiny bow at the front, artfully twisted in leather of darker blue.’ Stepping aside from the story for a moment, don’t those shoes sound just gorgeous? I have a mental image of them, along with Florence wearing a formal going-away suit in a matching shade of blue, and maybe even a Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat, white gloves and a white handbag – or are my timelines wrong? Perhaps Jackie Kennedy wore these later in the 60s? I don’t remember reading any other details of what Florence was actually wearing during supper, but I could have missed them. All I know is that if Ian McEwan went to a wedding and you asked him later what the bride’s dress looked like, he’d probably give a pretty good description – something most men can’t manage.

As you can probably already tell from the description of Florence’s shoes, the level of detail in the writing is wonderful. Unfortunately for me though, the same level of detail was also accorded to describing their kisses, with Edward’s fat tongue an unwelcome intruder in Florence’s mouth, along with her imagining his bodily parts and the horrors of being near to, seeing, or even worse, being penetrated by said parts. Edward’s hopes and dreams and imaginings when it came to their honeymoon night and beyond was no less detailed, although at least his thoughts and hopes were pleasurable.

Two minutes after their arrival in the bedroom, and I use the word ‘arrival’ on purpose, Florence was gone, running down the shingled beach outside their terrace room in horror and shame. Another opinion from me – there’s a lot to be said for sex education and open communication, for both boys and girls.

If you want to know how things worked out for this pair, read On Chesil Beach for yourself. Despite the details that made me feel squeamish, the story is as wonderful, as exquisite and as devastating as the blurb on the back cover by the Independent on Sunday said it would be.

Now, to watch the film.

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The Cockatoos: Shorter novels and stories by Patrick White

I’ve had The Cockatoos: Shorter novels and stories by Australian author Patrick White sitting unread on my bookshelves for a very long time. My problem was, I fell in love with The Tree of Man by White and was afraid the author’s other books would compare unfavourably.

But, as you can see, I summoned my courage and made a beginning.

The first story, A Woman’s Hand is about a retired English couple living out a bleak retirement in Australia during the 1950s. Evelyn and Harold Fazackerley were admired and considered to be the model of an ideal couple by nearly everyone they met, but their standards, snobbery and the memory of past friendships with rich or titled people kept them from experiencing joy in their present lives. They had enough money to take bus trips to what they called the Dead Heart, along with holidays to the Great Barrier Reef and New Zealand, but an occasion when Evelyn played matchmaker, which ended in disaster for the couple she brought together, also shaded their lives.

The Full Belly told of a Greek family starving during the German occupation of their town. Spinster sisters Maro and Pronoe were elderly and beginning to fail, while their young niece and nephew, Anna and Costa, a musician were also suffering. This is a story about principles and what people will do to eat when they are starving. I have to admit to not thinking too deeply about this story, as I don’t want to consider the lengths I might go to myself.

The Night the Prowler tells of the aftereffects when a young woman, Felicity Bannister was raped at knifepoint by an intruder in her family home. Felicity’s mother’s realisation that her own powers were limited and her father’s distress were nothing to Felicity’s anger, which led to her breaking her engagement to a worthy young man, then terrorising people in her community who elicited her rage.

Five-Twenty was the story of an elderly woman whose demanding, grumpy and wheelchair-bound husband had always taken advantage of her. Together of an afternoon they sat on their verandah and watched the traffic pass by their home on busy Parramatta Road, Sydney, watching out especially for a two-toned pink and brown Holden that passed their home at a certain time every weekday afternoon. After her husband’s death, a chance encounter with the driver set the woman’s heart alight in an odd love affair.

Sicilian Vespers was the story of a travelling Australian couple, Ivy and Charles Simpson, who fell in with an American couple in Italy who had the same initials as them. Their friendship, told through Ivy’s point of view, was strange and more than a little uncomfortable, at least from Ivy and Charles’ side.

The title story, The Cockatoos was my favourite of the collection. When a growing flock of wild cockatoos began to hang around local gardens and trees, a married couple who hadn’t spoken to each other in years found a shared interest in feeding and watching the cockies, as did the man’s long-standing mistress, a strange woman who lived further up their street. It amused me that the married couple wrote notes to each other to avoid speaking.

The following photo is of the top of a Norfolk Island pine tree near my home that has been stripped bare by Sulphur-crested cockatoos. The pink and grey birds are galahs and are far less noisy and destructive.

There was a strangeness about each of the stories in the collection. All of the characters were middle-aged and older and no one was happy, in fact, most of them were unhappy, unsatisfied, emotionally stilted and somewhat bored. The characters and their dark stories often petered out without a bang, much like real relationships and real lives.

I think the general unhappiness, combined with the odd plots and a slight dullness about this collection’s stories would make this unappealing to most readers. I didn’t love any of the six short stories in The Cockatoos as much as I did The Tree of Man, but won’t be afraid to move on to the other Patrick White novels on my shelves.

The Tree of Man by Patrick White

The Cockatoos: shorter novels and stories was book twenty of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, White - Patrick

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What You Are Looking For is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama

What You Are Looking For is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated into English by Alison Watts, is a short, feel-good read.

The story is comprised of five short stories with loosely-connected main characters living in Tokyo. Each of them were unhappy with their lives, but after visiting the library at Hatori Community House, were recommended a strange choice of book by the librarian along with a small, felted item. In each case, the book opened their eyes to something the main character needed in their lives.

Tomoko was a 21 year-old shop assistant working in a department store, bored with her work and feeling as if life was passing her by. After attending a computer course at the Community Centre Tomoko was asked by Mrs Komachi, the librarian, ‘What are you looking for?” who then recommended a much loved children’s book, Guri and Gura to Tomoko. The book gave Tomoko hope that she would recognise her direction in future. I was surprised to recognise the illustrations from Guri and Gura and think I must have came across these books in my school library as a child.

The second chapter or story followed Ryo, a 35 year-old accountant who dreamed of owning his own antique shop. Ryo was recommended a book about worms by the Royal Horticultural Society, which led him to an eye-opening realisation about his future and capabilities.

I found the third story to be the most relatable. Natsumi was a 40-year old whose career as a magazine editor was sidelined after she and her husband had a child. Natsumi also struggled with motherhood to some extent, as well as all of the work that generally falls to a mother in a household when there is a family to look after. A book about Japanese astrology called Door to the Moon by Yukari Ishii gave Natsumi the perspective she need to turn her life around.

The last two stories continued in the same vein, with the characters finding their way after stumbling into the library, then reading the book the librarian recommended to them after being asked, ‘What are you looking for?’ A young, unemployed man found the courage to follow his dream, while an older, newly-retired man realised that retirement could be a time for new interests and responsibilities.

As might be expected from a Japanese translation, the character’s voices were more formal and polite than I’m used to.

I did think the character’s voices were overly similar. Although each character’s circumstances were very different, the way the characters discovered their path in life were also similar, although for me, this isn’t a criticism. Instead, the repetitions felt like gentle reminders of the book’s lessons. A harsher critic might describe the stories as monotonous, despite the exotic (to me, anyway) Japanese atmosphere of the book.

I also enjoyed some of the oddities, including the math lesson Mrs Komachi gave one of the characters who despaired of succeeding in their field.

‘In the case of one hundred people, one person out of a hundred is one per cent, correct?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But in the case of one person doing the thing they want to do, there is only yourself, which means one person out of one, which is one hundred per cent.’

‘Huh?’

‘So there’s a hundred per cent chance.’

I found What You Are Looking For is in the Library to be a comforting read and suspect that for the right reader at the right time, it will also be an inspiring read.

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Aoyama - Michiko, Author, Book Review

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Juice by Tim Winton

For a book that is big and heavy enough to be used as a doorstop, I ripped through Juice by Tim Winton. It helped that the chapters are short and the sentences are clear and to the point, although funnily enough, the narrator is something of a Scheherazade, telling a long-winded story to try and save both his life and the life of a child he is travelling with, as he tries to find a safe place for them to stay for a while.

Set somewhere in the northern part of Western Australia several hundred years in the future, the unnamed narrator and his mother, along with the rest of the world’s inhabitants, are suffering as a result of how we are living our lives now. The equatorial zones, north of the Tropic of Capricorn and south of the Tropic of Cancer are uninhabitable, southern Australian cities are cesspools, and in the peninsula, where the story is set, people live underground for six months of the year to avoid extreme heat, monsoons, floods and cyclones. Winters above ground are bearable, with the temperature on a cold winter’s day hovering around the mid-thirties. Everyone has scabs and cankers caused by skin cancer.

Technology as we know it has collapsed and to an extent, so has society. Life is hard and getting worse, but people do what they can to get by. After a time known as the Terrors, the easy life we live now has been forgotten, and would not be believed by the characters in the story if they were to hear of it.

The narrator grew up in his parent’s compound, although his father died when he was a child. His family were growers who traded within their community, but when the narrator was aged around 17, he was recruited to join a secretive organisation known only as the Service. After seeing preserved films of the past, the narrator began going on missions with teams to assassinate the descendants of those who caused the world to be as it is now, finding people with the family names of Shell, Amazon and BP living in lavish bunkers built many years ago with slave labour and more money than anyone could imagine. The only reason for the Service’s actions seemed to be vengeance, with no mercy shown to the ancestors of these families.

At home, the narrator had a love affair with Sun, a young woman who came to his district as a vet. They had a child, Ester, but eventually, unable to cope with the narrator’s long absences while he was away on missions, Sun and Ester returned to the south.

I kept picturing the scenery and people and the horrors of the Mad Max films as I read; dry, dusty landscapes, and people warring over their most precious commodities, water, food and fuel, although Juice was a kinder, gentler story than the Mad Max stories. Juice included poignant hints of older times, too, with visits to caves that had ancient remains of Aboriginal Australians.

After devouring Juice in just a few days, I felt emotionally and physically exhausted when I finished reading. It’s horrifying to think that we are not leaving a better world for those who will come after us.

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Australian author, Book Review, Winton - Tim

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The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons

The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons was a surprise to me as the story was written and published in the mid-1960s. I’d incorrectly assumed the British Library Crime Classics novels were only set during the 1920s and 30s. Now I know!

Despite being set during the 1960s, most of the action took place at Belting in Kent, a gloomy monstrosity of a house with Victorian spires and buttresses and inside, dark shadows and an unhappy family. The narrator, Chris, had lived at Belting since he was orphaned during his childhood, and was taken care of by his great aunt, Lady Wainwright and her children, who were hanging around waiting for Lady W to die so they could get their inheritances.

Two of the Wainwright sons, Hugh and David, died during the Second World War leaving only Miles and Stephen living, but six years later when Chris was 18, Lady W received a letter from a man saying he was her son David Wainwright, and had been a prisoner in Germany then in a Russian prison camp, before spending the last few years living under an assumed name in Paris. Now that Lady W’s death was imminent, he wanted to come home to see his mother and, surprise surprise, claim his inheritance.

As expected, Lady W was overjoyed to see her lost son while Stephen and Miles thought he was an imposter. Chris reserved his judgement, but launched an investigation. I used to work for a man who loved to get to the bottom of what was going on in his business, whenever there was a strange occurrence or an outright mystery he would smile, press his palms together and say that we’d ‘launch an investigation’. It still makes me smile to think of it.

Bodies started piling up and I suspected everyone and everything, except for the right person and the right set of circumstances, and I had no idea how this story would all work out until the very last pages. The clues were all there, I just didn’t spot them.

I liked watching Chris grow up, before and after his arrival at Belting, and I found the social aspects of this story to be fascinating. The Wainwrights had a fairly high opinion of themselves, but as Chris ventured out in the world he discovered that other people had far less regard for his family and the aristocracy in general. These were valuable lessons at the right time for a likeable young man who would have to make his own way in the world.

The writing was excellent and as I said, the plot kept me guessing, but the descriptions of Kent and Folkestone were also of great interest to me as my grandfather came from that area. I’ve never been there but hope visit to one day.

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Author, Book Review, Symons - Julian

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Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene

I hadn’t expected Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene to be so funny, especially since the only other Graham Greene book I’d read, Brighton Rock, left me feeling as if Brighton and the rest of the world was a dangerous and violent place.

Instead, Travels With My Aunt confirmed the world is an exciting place to discover – if only people have the courage to leave home and hearth in search of adventure in exotic places, with or without an unscrupulous aunt in tow.

The story began with the narrator, Henry Pulling, a middle-aged, retired banker who spent his solitary days growing dahlias, meeting his long-lost Aunt Augusta on the day of his mother’s funeral. Henry didn’t appear to be terribly sad about his mother’s death, instead, he was enjoying the change to his daily routine, which had grown slightly tedious to him since his retirement.

Instead of going home to water his dahlias after the funeral, Henry went for a drink with his flamboyant and unconventional aunt at her place, only to discover that she lived in rooms above a pub – with a black lover – a shocking thing for the time, and not just because Augusta was aged in her seventies. Before long, Augusta told Henry that his mother was really his stepmother, although she didn’t tell him who his real mother was. I don’t know if Henry was naïve or an unreliable narrator, but I don’t think it is much of a spoiler to say that I realised who Henry’s mother was long before he did.

Henry was the sort of person who didn’t like change. Life at the bank had taught him ‘to be wary of whims. Whims so often end in bankruptcy.’ What can you say to that? No doubt what Henry said about whims is true, but this line made me snort with laughter, and not for the first time during the book.

At one point Henry commented that as a child he had been ‘Afraid of burglars and Indian things and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert’, which I discovered is a deep purple dahlia whose leaves fade to a white tip. I regularly drive past a garden with the most magnificent dahlias that are sold for ten dollars a bunch by the elderly gardener. The gardener told me when I was buying dahlias recently for my mother that he had bred some of them himself. I keep imagining my elderly dahlia gardener as Henry – there is no way he would leave his garden to go off and have an adventure.

Henry did leave his dahlias though, to travel across Europe with his Aunt Augusta. Before long, he was embroiled in crime, had been deported from Turkey, smoked pot with the daughter of a CIA operative, and was learning not to let his jaw drop to the ground when Aunt Augusta said things like, ‘I prefer an occasional orgy to a nightly routine’.

Henry had never been in love, but was considering marriage to the daughter of a former client, a Miss Keene, who tatted. I investigated tatting (reading is so informative!) and learned the craft is similar to crochet but more complex and finer; think lace doilies and collars. As Henry’s Aunt Augusta pointed out though, he and Miss Keene would almost certainly run out of conversation within six months of marriage, and would then be left with an endless and lonely marriage stretching before them.

One’s life is formed, I sometimes think, by books than human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

After Miss Keene went out to live in South Africa with some relatives she typed hilarious letters to Henry. She hadn’t quite got the hang of typing and told him she saw ‘Gone with the Qind‘ at the movies, and didn’t think ‘Clark Fable’ as good as she remembered him.

Other characters’ behaviour and conversations were equally telling. During a conversation at Christmas lunch with his neighbour, Major Charge, Henry said he thought the British Empire was gone, but in reply,

‘A temporary failure of nerves,’ Major Charge snapped and bayoneted his turkey.

After several adventures across Europe, Henry came to realise that his Aunt Augusta was unscrupulous, manipulative and selfish, but that he enjoyed her company and taking part in her adventures far more than he loved his dahlias and his formerly quiet life at home in England. Henry’s morals declined over the course of the story, but he became happier and more full of life and adventure than anyone would have believed in the beginning.

Aunt Augusta didn’t change at all. She remained unrepentant about the life she had lived, which included working in a brothel, having affairs with war criminals, stealing and lying and smuggling and so, so much more.

I think Graham Greene must have fallen in love with his characters and that he would had great fun writing this book. I intend to watch the film with Dame Maggie Smith starring as Aunt Augusta as soon as I can.

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Author, Book Review, Greene - Graham

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Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym

Oh, the serendipity! While reading Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym, an author whose books I’ve been trying to get my hands for what feels like forever, I found a hardback copy of A Very Private Eye, Barbara Pym’s autobiography, in an Op Shop. And, the book was half price, only $1.50 Australian! Less than a bar of chocolate! This find was especially pleasing after paying a small fortune for my copy of Crampton Hodnet in an independent Melbourne book shop. I’m happy to pay for books, but my budget isn’t unlimited. I buy several new books each month that always include one Australian author, but the remainder of my books come from the library or from Op Shops.

As I said, I’ve been on the lookout for fiction by Barbara Pym for ages, but her works aren’t readily available in Australian bookshops. Crampton Hodnet was well-worth the wait though. This author has such a light, funny touch that a reader could be forgiven for thinking that her subject matter is light too, but it’s not. Some of the characters’ sorrows in this story were ridiculous, but they were no less troubling to the suffering characters than what bigger issues are to people who have more to bear. The characters had their joys too, but I think the happiest character was Miss Morrow, the companion of an elderly and rigid mistress. Miss Morrow was at the bottom of the social ladder in this cast of characters, but as a realist who accepted her lot in life, she was at peace.

The story followed a year in the life of a loosely-connected family, their friends, lovers and in one case, a lodger, who lived in North Oxford during the late 1930s. On the surface the character’s lives were dull and routines, and in Miss Morrow’s case, drudgery, but underneath, they all had their secrets and dreams.

Miss Morrow’s employer was Miss Doggett, who never turned down an invitation from a titled person. Miss Doggett was overly concerned with the morals of others and took it upon herself to regularly invite young male students from Oxford University to tea at her dark and gothic Victorian home so she could keep up with all of the gossip, including the news that her nephew, Francis Cleveland, who was a don at the university, had fallen in love with a young female student.

Francis’ wife Margaret was more concerned with keeping her husband out of her way than worrying about what he might be up to, since he tended to mooch around the house and annoy her when he was bored. Margaret acknowledged to herself that it had been at least twenty years since she had found her husband interesting, but on the whole she was satisfied with life.

Francis and Margaret’s daughter Anthea had a tumultuous year too, having fallen in love with a student who intended one day to be the Prime Minister, and had been enjoying regular romantic liaisons with him before tea in his rooms. Miss Doggett approved of this budding romance because the young man’s father had been the British Ambassador in Warsaw, had a title and was rich. Tick, tick, tick.

Meanwhile Mr Latimer, a young curate who was lodging with Miss Doggett, proposed to Miss Morrow in an attempt to deter unwanted female attention from other women. Luckily Miss Morrow had more sense than to accept his lacklustre proposal.

I believe Crampton Hodnet was Barbara Pym’s first book even though it wasn’t published until after her death. Even so, the writing and story was charming, funny and clever and I can’t wait to read her later and more polished works.

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Author, Book Review, Pym - Barbara

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Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

In case anyone missed the news, Stone Yard Devotional by Australian author Charlotte Wood was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. It didn’t win, and since I haven’t read the book that did win I can’t in good conscience say which was more deserving, but I can say that in my opinion, Stone Yard Devotional was a worthy entrant.

I might be biased, a) because I’m Australian and b) because I’m a fan of Charlotte Wood’s writing, but this book did give me ‘all the feels.’ (Isn’t that a horrid expression? Everyone around me seems to be using it at the moment, although someone who writes as beautifully as Charlotte Wood probably doesn’t). I felt all of the emotions that the un-named narrator did as she went through her experiences, and at one point, tears welled up in my eyes and a big lump lodged itself in the bottom of my throat. Days after finishing the book, I’m still thinking about the characters, the place and their lives.

The story was set in an unnamed place that sounds to me like Cooma, a small town in the high, dry plains of the Monaro district south of Canberra in New South Wales. Many years ago, when we lived on the South Coast of NSW, we used to drive a teenage Honey-Bunny almost three hours to the squash courts at Cooma to play in junior competitions. My memories of the drive across the plains and the areas surrounding the town are of the landscape, which was a dull green-grey shade peculiar to the region. We must have travelled there in late spring or early summer, since the photo on the cover of this book shows a more yellowed, dry landscape.

Part One of Stone Yard Devotional began with the narrator arriving at a nunnery for a retreat where she stayed in her own cabin and pondered the impending end of her marriage. During this visit she did not interact with the Catholic sisters other than watching them in church as they prayed at set times during the day, Lauds and Vespers and Middle Hour. The narrator wondered how the sisters got anything done in between prayers, until she realised that prayers were the sisters’ actual work and that for them, everything else was an interruption to their day.

After a leap in time of what might have been years, Part Two began again during the Covid pandemic, with the narrator having already lived with the community for an unspecified amount of time.

I don’t think the word ‘Catholic’ was used at any time during this story and similarly, none of the rituals or beliefs were explained at any time, although the narrator had clearly been educated in the Catholic faith and had an almost instinctive understanding of the sister’s devotionals and way of life. However, the story was told in such a way that a reader who had not been exposed to Catholicism would understand everything. The narrator clearly didn’t believe everything that the sisters did, she questioned the existence of God and what she had learned during religious instruction as a child, and she rolled her eyes when another sister said that she was there because she had fallen in love with Jesus – sort of like a crush on a teenage idol. Instead, the narrator seemed to need the silence, the meditative effects of prayer and the physical work of her chores to find her own peace.

The narrator’s thoughts often turned to her own mother, who had died young. Her mother had done practical good works for the town’s community including helping refugees from Vietnam who had settled in the area, and fund raising for causes that were unpopular with the townspeople. The narrator’s mother wasn’t at all religious.

The narrator also thought often about a girl she had once known, Helen Parry, who had been the brunt of constant bullying while they were at school together. During the second half of the story the narrator was shocked to learn that Helen was now a nun too, and that she was on her way to stay with the community, bringing with her the bones of another nun who had been murdered many years ago while doing missionary works overseas.

Amongst all of the turmoil caused by Helen Parry’s disruptive interruption into the sister’s daily lives, there was a mouse plague. It is almost impossible to understand how horrific a mouse plague is unless you have seen enormous piles of dead mice, smelled places that have been infested and seen the damage that they do. I was billeted for a week on a farm near Goulburn NSW as a teenager for an inter-school sports competition, at a time when there was a mouse plague and have never forgotten it. The author did a very good job of describing the physical and psychological effects of the plague on the characters, as well as depicting the narrator’s disgust and horror. I shuddered along with her on several occasions.

Readers who aren’t religious shouldn’t be put off from reading this book because of the setting. The story’s themes are forgiveness and grieving and the different ways of doing good, which are universal and separate to religion. However, this book is meditative and other than the mouse plague, might not suit a reader who likes lots of action and dialogue. Since I like a quiet and deep novel, Stone Yard Devotional suited me perfectly. I’ve since passed this book on to my mother, who was brought up a Catholic and was educated by nuns, and am eagerly waiting on her to finish it so we can discuss the story and themes.

My purchases of Stone Yard Devotional continues my New Year’s resolution for 2025 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (February). I purchased this book from The Bookshop at Queenscliff.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Wood - Charlotte

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The Vanished Land by Richard Zachariah

The Vanished Land: Disappearing dynasties of Victoria’s Western District by Richard Zachariah reminded me of how I felt after reading James Joyce’s Dubliners, where I was left wanting to write my version of the stories of the people from the little place on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road where I grew up.

Richard Zacharia’s book, The Vanished Land is about the same people who in my review of Dubliners who I called, ‘the horde of upper-class holiday makers who sun-bathed together, played golf together and drank together at the golf club without ever noticing a local.’

These people were the social elite of their time, the squattocracy, a political force with enormous clout, wealthy, well-educated, privileged people whose Scottish ancestors cleared the Western Districts of Victoria of the Aboriginal people to take the land for their own, which they then grazed livestock on. For 150 years the families Zacharia writes about grew rich on the sheep’s back, earning what can only be described as mad money during the 1950s when ‘a pound for a pound’ payments for wool resulted in Western District farmers cashing million-pound cheques (in today’s money, around $34 million Australian dollars). Zacharia claims there were more Rolls Royces in the Western District during the 1950s than anywhere else in Australia, and I don’t doubt it.

The author had a personal connection with many of the families and the properties he wrote about. His father was the headmaster at the Hamilton and Western District Boys’ College, so he grew up with a particular generation of these families, and has retained a strong sense of nostalgia for the grandeur and privileged debauchery he experienced as a teenager when he tagged along with his rich friends.

Throughout the book, Zacharia bemoaned that this way of life, which he called a ‘belle epoque,’ had been and gone, after many of the families sold out to multinationals, or failed as a result of not adequately planning for succession, or who otherwise found farming too much hard work and moved on. In some cases, shock, horror, the properties were handed over to daughters. Zacharia says the little inland towns are dying and that many of the enormous, impractical old bluestone homesteads have been, or are being razed. He might be right, many of the small towns in the Western Districts are little more than ghost towns and some of the old piles have been demolished, but my feeling was that the author’s personal sadness often got in the way of accepting the realities of farming and of the enormous expense in maintaining an unusable old mansion.

My father, who was a farmer on a much smaller scale than the people who comprised the subject matter of this book, religiously bought lotto tickets. Dad always said if he ever won he would keep on farming until the money was all gone.

I was familiar with a great many of the family names in The Vanished Land. When the right names and place is searched, hundred-year old newspaper articles come up on Trove, saying who was there for the summer, who they were staying with if they didn’t own their own sea-side cottages, and descriptions of what the ladies wore to their balls. Their names are on local golfing trophies, and so far as I know, some of their descendants still spend their summers on the golf course, fishing the river or sun-baking themselves to lizard skins on the beach.

Some of the names that Zacharia holds in such esteem weren’t all that highly thought of by the locals. A story I remember hearing as a child was about a drunken beach party some generations ago where a piano was dropped over the cliff so the revelers could have music, and was smashed into bits timber on the sand. How could these rich, entitled people be thought of as anything other than debauched fools?

However, when journalists came looking one summer when I was a child for a particularly high-profile person, not one person told them where they could be found, although of course everyone knew. It’s a different story today, with the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unable to buy himself a beach house without a ludicrous amount of media interest.

The writing sometimes wallowed, and I don’t think the author’s ‘lost white tribe’ is as much of a loss as he thinks it is, but I still enjoyed this book, mostly because of my familiarity with the names and places described within and I can well-understand the author’s fascination with the losses these families have suffered.

I don’t think this book would be of much interest to anyone unless they had a personal connection to Western District, but I enjoyed it and will pass the book on to my mother, who I expect will enjoy it for the same reasons as I did.

My purchase of The Vanished Land begins my New Year’s resolution for 2025 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (January). Fittingly for a book set in this part of the world, I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool.

Dubliners by James Joyce

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Author, Book Review, Zachariah - Richard

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People Like Them by Samira Sedira

Although People Like Them by Samira Sedira was translated from French to English by Lara Vergnaud, the story read as though it was originally written in English. The story was so short it only took me an hour or so to read.

People Like Them is a thriller set in a mountain village in France. When Bakary and Sylvia Langlois built a luxurious chalet next door to Anna and Constant Guillot, the two families became friends, but when Anna started working as a cleaner for the Langlois family, her and Constant’s relationship with Bakary and Sylvia changed, along with their relationships with other long-term locals.

The story was narrated by Anna, as if she was writing it to Constant in a letter. It began with a description of their quiet lives in their peaceful, silent village, where no one heard a thing as Bakar, Sylvia and their three children were murdered. By the second chapter, it was revealed that Constant was the murderer.

Anna’s narration included the lead-up to the murder and Constant’s trail, before ending with an event one year after the trial ended.

Up until the last page, I expected a big reveal – an explanation of why Constant killed his neighbours to be precise, but this never came. Instead, there was an explanation of sorts in the Author’s Notes at the end of the book where the author explained that the story was loosely based on a 2003 mass murder in France, going on to say that racism and other factors, caused Constant to go mad. Learning why was satisfying, but I think the author should have worked this into the story instead.

None of the characters came to life for me, making me wonder if the story would have worked better if it had been told in the style of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, with the author carrying out interviews with those involved in the real story and sticking to the facts.

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Author, Book Review, Sedira - Samira

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The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

I was busting to read The Husbands by Holly Gramazio after reading Karissa’s review a few months ago, but at the time the book wasn’t available in Australia. As soon as The Husbands appeared on our shelves I snapped it up and found it well-worth the wait; I stayed up far too late reading the first night then finished the book the next day when I should have been doing other things.

Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

The Husbands follows the life of Lauren, a single woman living in London who come home drunk one night to find she has a husband and a life with him that she can’t remember. Her flat looks slightly different to what she remembers and to add to her confusion, now includes a large wedding photo of her and Michael on her lounge room wall. Lauren’s phone also shows a history she has no memory of, with photos of her and Michael and years of text conversations with him. When Lauren checks in with her family and friends they confirm that her life with Michael is the status quo; they have no memory of Lauren as a single woman only the day before.

However, when Michael goes up the ladder into the flat’s attic to change a lightbulb, a different husband comes down. More confused than ever, Lauren asked this new husband to check something in the attic, causing a different husband to come down the ladder, resetting her entire life again.

Once Lauren realised she could change husbands and her entire life just by sending the latest fellow into her attic, she was off and running, changing husbands nilly-willy.

In fairness to Lauren, she hadn’t particularly wanted a husband, but since she couldn’t get rid of them there was no point keeping a husband who didn’t particularly appeal to her. Somehow, though, none of them were exactly right for her. Lauren decided very quickly that some husbands just weren’t her style; anyone with a beard was sent back instantly, a verbally abusive man and another whose sexually suggestive comments put her off before he even stepped off the ladder were also sent back into the attic for replacement quick-smart.

Quite a few of the husbands were lovely. Lauren kept some around for a little while, but since her whole life was reset each time she got a new husband, sometimes she found herself in debt, working in a job she hated or otherwise in a situation that she didn’t want to be in, so in these cases she also returned the husband to the attic hoping for better luck with the next one.

One of the most interesting parts of the story was how Lauren’s life subtly differed with each husband, including her career and finances, the decor and cleanliness of her flat, and the actual lifestyle she lived with each man. Some of the changes were less easy to define; I’ll describe these as who someone is as a cumulation of their habits, good or bad.

I was surprised that the differences often extended to Lauren’s family and friends. In one case, Lauren’s sister had broken up with her wife and had no children. Lauren quickly got rid of that husband to restore her sister’s current happiness, even though her sister had no idea her life had ever been different.

I was unable to put this book down and I’m not going to lie, when He Who Eats All of Our Leftovers began an in-depth conversation about a household matter I’ve been avoiding while I was reading, the thought crossed my mind that if I had an attic, right in that moment, I might have sent him up there. Later, when I’d finished the book (and resolved the household issue), I thought about it some more and decided I would definitely have regretted swapping my lovely husband out for another husband!

The author’s bio says that she is, amongst other things, a game designer, which I suspect has played into her ability to create such a clever plot with so many unexpected twists and turns. I was also surprised to learn the author grew up in Adelaide, South Australia’s capital city, as the story setting was very ‘London’.

Fans of movies such as Sliding Doors and Groundhog Day, and Kate Atkinson’s marvelous book Life After Life will almost certainly enjoy The Husbands as much as I did.

I will definitely read this author’s next book.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Gramazio - Holly

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Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie, perhaps not unexpectedly, had the much-loved Belgian detective visiting an English country house at Christmas-time to solve a murder.

Rich old Simeon Lee probably brought it all on himself by inviting his entire family to spend Christmas with him at Gorston Hall, where he lived with his long-suffering son Alfred and Alfred’s wife, Lydia. As Hercule Poirot himself pointed out, indigestion from over-eating causes irritability, which often flares into something worse when sufferers are forced to pretend to be amiable towards their families at Christmas-time. Although the reasons for Simeon Lee being murdered weren’t indigestion, rather, it was a family trait that was his undoing; specifically, an urge for revenge.

Simeon’s ill-fated family Christmas gathering also included his son Harry, the black sheep of the family, another son, George, a politician and his much younger wife Magdalene, and Simeon’s youngest son David and his wife Hilda. Other house guests included Simeon’s Spanish grand-daughter Pilar and the son of Simeon’s former South African business partner, Stephen Farr.

To stir up discontent, Simeon made it known to his family that he intended to change his will, so when he was murdered inside a locked room a few days before Christmas, everyone in the household became a suspect.

As usual, I suspected all of the wrong people while completely overlooking the actual murderer. I’m happy to say that I figured out one or two other mysteries in the story on my own, though.

I was amused by the dedication by Agatha Christie to her brother-in-law James, who told her he yearned for a “good violent murder with lots of blood.” I suspect he was quite satisfied with the amount of blood in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.

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Author, Book Review, Christie - Agatha

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The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland

I was thrilled to get The Shiralee by D’Arcy Niland, an Australian classic published in 1955 for the Classics Club Spin #39.

I loved this story, albeit with reservations. The story is of its time; the main character, Macauley, is a man’s man who denigrates anyone who isn’t the same as him, including Aboriginal people, people who weren’t white, people with mixed heritage, gay people, city people, weaker-minded people and, surprise, surprise; women. For this reason I don’t think The Shiralee would get published now, even though the writing itself was superb. And, for readers from outside of Australia or even Australian readers now who are unfamiliar with the slang of fifty to seventy years ago, the language, particularly the dialogue, might be incomprehensible.

To begin with, a shiralee is the load carried by a swaggie (swagman). I don’t ever remember hearing this word used except in relation to this book or the film of the same name, although I do remember my grandmother and father talking about swaggies coming to the farm during the 1940s or 50s.

In this story Macauley had two shiralees, his bedroll and his bits and pieces, and his four-year old daughter, Buster, who he had taken from his wife six months ago after returning unannounced to Sydney and finding his wife in bed with another man. Macauley took Buster almost entirely to spite his wife, however the joke was on him, as his wife didn’t want to be tied down by the child either.

To be fair to Macauley’s wife, being married to someone who was never around was obviously not her choice, but Mac was also concerned about his daughter’s welfare, since she had been drugged while his wife messed around with her other man.

Mac was an angry man, although his anger appeared to me to be a result of his wife’s betrayal. He chose his itinerant life as he was a wanderer by nature and unable to settle down. Mac walked all over New South Wales, working when he needed to and meeting old friends along the way. He was an quick-tempered man who settled arguments with his fists, but for some reason Buster loved him from the beginning, although he didn’t feel the same about her.

Buster was just as tough as her father, a quality he admired. But she was also a little girl and she walked and talked and talked and walked, asking her father questions that he couldn’t answer and making friends with other swaggies, itinerants and more than a few townspeople wherever they went.

And Gooby! Buster’s beloved stuffed toy was made for a church bazaar by an old lady, but when no one bought the old lady’s creations a shopkeeper bought them to spare her feelings. Gooby was ‘made of brown felt: it looked as though it had started out to be a giraffe, changed itself to a cat, and then called off the deal at the last moment in favour of camelhood.’ The shopkeeper offered Buster her choice of toys in an attempt to console her over her lost caterpillar and she chose Gooby.

Eventually, Mac realised he loved his daughter.

D’Arcy Niland’s writing was enormously evocative. Although Maucaley was inarticulate his thoughts were deep and insightful and each of the character’s emotions were real and raw, and the way they were expressed were particularly Australian. For example, the man who was messing around with Mac’s wife was a ‘cheeky koala-headed bastard. I immediately pictured a flash cove who resembled Norman Lindsay’s character Bunyip Bluegum from The Magic Pudding.

The writing in the story outside of the dialogue was that lovely, old-fashioned, slightly formal Australian English that you never hear any more except in old films and news reels. I had to look up several words, including concupiscent, which was used when Macauley was attracted to a woman who was not his wife. Macauley’s attitude to women was complicated; he saw women as types, mother figures or whores, good sorts or shrews.

I’m not going to condemn The Shiralee because it is from a different time, instead I would expect that other readers would recognise for themselves that values and ideas have changed and adjust their opinions and reactions to the story accordingly. To add to this point, I would also suggest that in seventy years time, it is likely that behaviours and attitudes that we now think are good and right will be considered to be despicable for reasons we cannot now imagine. The Shiralee was called the Great Australian novel by the Argus newspaper when it was published, which suggests to me that readers then didn’t have any issues with the many, many things that raised my eyebrows seventy years later.

Interestingly, D’Arcy Niland was married to Ruth Park, who wrote The Harp in the South, Playing Beatie Bow and The Muddle-Headed Wombat, amongst many other much-loved books.

The Shiralee has twice been made into a film but I’ve never seen either. I’ll remedy that soon and will look out for other books by this author.

The Shiralee was book fifteen of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

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Australian author, Author, Book Review, Classics Club, Niland - D'Arcy

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Twice Round the Clock by Billie Houston

The personal story of Billie Houston, the author of Twice Round the Clock reprinted as a British Library Crime Classics, was equally as interesting as the fiction story.

According to the introduction by Martin Edwards the author, whose real name was Sarah McMahon Gribbin, was part of a vaudeville act with her sister called the Houston Sisters and appeared at Royal Variety Command performances and in films. The author wrote only this one book, and years later told her daughter it was only published because she was a celebrity. I agree with Martin Edwards’ assessment however that although some books should be forgotten, this one shouldn’t be. Twice Round the Clock was clever and funny, although in fairness, the ending was a mess.

Twice Round the Clock began with the 4am murder of Horace Manning at his remote country home, where a group of bright young things, their stodgy parents and various hangers-on had gathered to celebrate the engagement of Manning’s daughter Helen to Tony Fane.

Horace Manning was a scientist who was working on something Very Important and Secret. He showed himself to their guests as an unhinged, cruel sadist. The Fane family felt terribly sorry for Helen, who was visibly afraid of her father, but consoled themselves with the knowledge she would be out of his clutches after she married Tony.

After the murdered man was found, the story’s clock rewound to 4pm the previous afternoon, describing what each of the characters were doing at that time; for example, Tony Fane had summoned his courage to visit Horace Manning and ask his permission to marry Helen. Each subsequent chapter moved the story forward by another hour or so.

The language in this story was delightful and the author had such a knack for funny, realistic dialogue that I could almost hear the character’s voices. I also enjoyed the various romances between the younger crowd. I had no idea who the murderer was and suspected everyone, right up until all of the secrets were revealed at the end, but unfortunately, the ending was silly and not fair-play.

I think the author would have managed the ending much better had she been able to access Microsoft Word, read her story back and make some changes along the way, but considering she wrote it on scraps of paper while waiting backstage to perform on stage, I think making a mess of the story’s ending can be forgiven.

I highly recommend Twice Round the Clock just for the fun of it.

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Author, Book Review, Houston - Billie

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The Haunting of House Hill by Shirley Jackson

I started reading The Haunting of House Hill by Shirley Jackson during the daytime, in bright sunshine. When I woke up at 2am the following night and couldn’t sleep (this occasionally happens), I read a little more. Big mistake. A shadowy house at night is a very different thing to a sunny house during the day. Reading this story didn’t help me to go back to sleep.

The Haunting of House Hill was written in 1959 and follows a group of people staying at Hill House for the purposes of a scientific study of paranormal activity. The instigator, Dr Montague wrote to a dozen people who were sensitive to ghosts or who had telepathic ability, asking them to stay with him for the summer at a haunted house he had rented. In the end, only two people showed up, Eleanor, a lonely woman in her early thirties who had been overlooked by life, and Theodora, a vibrant, unconventional attention-seeker. The trio were joined by a member of the current owner’s family, Luke, a charming thief who would one day inherit Hill House.

The locals thought Hill House was haunted and Dr Montague considered it to be evil. The house had been built wrong, with odd angles and a circular, confusing design, which left the occupants feeling unsettled without knowing why. The housekeeper’s repetitive warnings to Dr Montague and his guests were frightening, she would not stay at the house after dark, and her adherence to meal timetables would have been funny if they hadn’t been so rigid.

It didn’t take long for the guests to experience frightening, inexplicable events at night that seemed to centre around Eleanor. She was an strange woman, who lied to herself and to the others. Eleanor seemed almost to believe some of her lies, such as driving past a cottage with a pretty garden and imagining herself living there, while others were less benign. Her introduction included the following line; The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. Ouch.

Eleanor and Theodora started out at Hill House as friends, but eventually Eleanor began to resent Theodora, leading to a slide in Eleanor’s mental stability. As the paranormal activity ramped up, Eleanor, who had been terribly concerned about the others talking about her, wasn’t being talked about at all and was so excluded by the group that I wasn’t even sure at times if she even existed.

By the end of the story, I couldn’t decide if anything happened at Hill House, or if nothing happened at all. Either way, I’m hoping for a full night’s sleep tonight.

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Author, Book Review, Jackson - Shirley

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Second Best by David Foenkinos

Second Best by French author David Foenkinos is about a fictional boy who was runner-up to Daniel Radcliffe to play Harry Potter.

The story began with an English man and a French woman falling in love and starting a life together. They had a son, Martin, but separated when he was quite young. Martin’s mother returned to Paris while he stayed with his father in London, visiting his mother on weekends and for holidays.

Martin’s father worked as a prop-guy on films. A producer who had signed the Harry Potter books to be made into films spotted Martin on set waiting for his father, and immediately thought he had found his ‘Harry.’ Martin, who had read and loved Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, auditioned for the role twice but lost to Daniel Radcliffe, leaving Martin traumatised by the experience.

I almost gave this book up half-way through. The short chapters and abrupt story-telling style felt clumsy to me, and I felt removed from the character’s emotions. I persevered because Second Best was such a short book, and I knew it would only take me another hour or so to read the second half.

The book’s ending was satisfactory, and I spent some time afterwards wondering if actors are as affected as Martin was by missing out on a role in a block-buster film series. While athletes and sportspeople can probably relate, I could also think of plenty of examples of being or at least feeling second best in every day life, for example, not getting a particular job or suffering from unrequited love.

But, back to the story. Martin suffered from depression after his disappointment and was unable to move on, mainly because there was no escaping the Harry Potter phenomenon. His trauma lasted well into his adult life. Part of the reason I couldn’t relate might be because I’ve always been able to bounce back from my disappointments.

So, what to make Second Best? An interesting idea, but the story and writing failed to fully engage me.

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Author, Book Review, Foenkinos - David

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Great Australian CWA Stories by Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh

Great Australian CWA Stories by Bill ‘Swampy’ Marsh is a terrific collection of interviews with Country Women’s Association members, interspersed with household hints and never-fail CWA recipes for everything from Ox Tail Soup (the ox tail can be replaced by kangaroo tail if liked), to Tomato Chutney and Scones. One cake recipe had a note saying that it had won many prizes at the Dubbo Show and another had the descriptor ‘splendid’ in brackets after the title, which are exactly the kind of recipes I like. Although I always say that my cooking style is CWA, Ox Tongue is never going to be on my menu, and neither is Sheep’s Head Soup using dehydrated vegetables.

The author interviewed approximately seventy members of CWA branches. Some where from places I’ve never heard of, including Wandering, Booborowie, Caniambo, Trundle and Euromanga. Places I had heard of included Boulder, Tennant Creek, Cloncurry, Moruya and Cobden, but regardless of whether I’d heard of their areas or not, the members did good works, fundraised, learned handicrafts and cookery skills, and enjoyed their friendships with other women from their communities. Don’t be misled by the fun stuff, though, as a political body the CWA also have some serious clout.

The skills the members learned also led them to taking on various roles in the CWA. One of the interviewees told a story about winning her Branch round of an Oratory Competition, which she credited to being the only person in the competition! She then went on to win at the Group level, then Divisional, before winning the Oratory Competition at State level, which led to her eventually becoming National President of the CWA.

Another woman was told by her mother when she left home to get married, to join the CWA and you’ll never be without friends. Variations of this theme often came up in the interviews.

One woman who grew up in a coastal town, married a farmer whose remote property could only be accessed by a flying fox in the wet. Well, three months after her wedding the flying fox broke while she was on it. She spent the next five months in hospital with four spinal fractures, and for the rest of her life has used crutches to walk. She said how grateful she was to the local CWA at the time of her accident, and went on to become involved with the organisation herself, lobbying the government on environmental issues.

One interview was with Carol Clay, a former CWA President, a name that pulled me up with a jolt. Carol and her lover were murdered on a camping trip and their murderer has only recently been found and sentenced to jail for 32 years.

Although many of the older women interviewed worried that there aren’t enough young woman joining the CWA for the organisation to continue, one interview was with a young woman from the newly formed Perth Belles, a group for young women. Another young woman came to Australia from England to take part on a television show, Desperately Seeking Sheila, but didn’t meet the farmer of her dreams during the show. Happily, she met a bachelor for whom things had not worked out either at the show’s premiere, and they hit it off. Now she’s married with children and has joined the CWA.

Many of the interviewees also talked about the CWA catering for local events in years gone by, including for weddings, where the older set cooked and the younger set waited on the guest’s tables. The CWA are still known for providing afternoon teas at Agricultural Shows and they have an association with Laucke, who sell the CWA Scone Mix in all good supermarkets.

To sum up, CWA members have the reputation of getting in and doing what needs to be done. Long may they continue.

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Australian author, Book Review, Marsh - Bill 'Swampy'

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Animal Farm by George Orwell

I’m not sure that I’ll have anything to say about Animal Farm by George Orwell that hasn’t been said many times before, however, I’ll try.

If you haven’t read Animal Farm before and are putting it off, you might like to know this is a short book, a novella, really, and a very fast read.

Animal Farm is also an easy read, superficially anyway, due to Orwell’s clarity of writing. That might be another pleasant surprise for someone who hasn’t read the book for themself, since we tend to assume that classic books will be a slog and hard to read.

I read this book as a set text in school, probably around year nine or ten when I was about fifteen years old, and I don’t think the study of this book was wasted on me. I generally remembered the plot, the characters, and a number of quotes from the book, including the changing of the seven commandments that were painted on the side of the barn to a single line; ‘ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.’

More importantly, I remembered why this book was chosen as a set text – the story contains important messages, and it isn’t much of a stretch for a young student to make the connection between the plot, the characters and the real events and people they were based on, with a nudge from their teacher. One of the nudges I remember from my English teacher (although I can’t remember my teacher’s name, or even if they were male or female) was that each of the animal characters was based on an historical figure. During my first read I didn’t know anything at all about the Russian Revolution or the Stalin years, and I’m sorry to say that after all this time, I only know a very little bit more, but that little bit more has greatly enhanced my appreciation of Animal Farm the second time around.

Animal Farm was book fourteen of my second Classics Club challenge to read 50 classics before my challenge end date of September 22, 2028.

I’m also linking this post to Brona’s Reading Orwell 2024 Challenge, at This Reading Life.

https://bronasbooks.com/2024/01/02/reading-orwell-2024-masterpost/

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Author, Book Review, Orwell - George

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Downton Shabby by Hopwood DePree

Downton Shabby by Hopwood DePree was given to me by DJ, who read and enjoyed this story and thought I would, too.

The author lived in Hollywood where he worked as a writer, performer and independent film maker, when he began researching his family tree and discovered that the legendary English castle in his family’s stories was a real place called Hopwood Hall near Middleton in the north-west of England.

Hopwood learned that Hopwood Hall had been his ancestor’s home for 500 years, but after the last male heirs were killed in World War One, the sixty-room building was vacated and left to fall into disrepair. Almost on a whim the author visited the falling-down property with his mother and sister, deciding soon after to save the Hall, even though he knew the restoration work would take years, cost millions of pounds and that he himself was close to useless when it came to doing hands-on, practical works.

Hopwood soon realised that a team of people were keen to help restore the hall, including Bob, the Hall’s caretaker, Ian, an electrician whose mother had worked in the Hall, and the many, many local people whose own family histories were connected with the Hall as a result of their ancestors working there.

While reading this book I also enjoyed looking at YouTube videos of the works in progress at Hopwood Hall. The author has certainly made up for his lack of DIY skills with his ability to generate passion and interest in the Hall’s restoration project, and has been successful in winning grants from various bodies to help with the enormous costs of the repairs. Hopwood has also made the most of his connections with English aristocracy and becoming a member of support groups for others who have taken on historic homes. Good for him, too, because he has taken on an enormous task. I believe the restoration works are expected to take another five years, and even then the Hall will require buckets of money to keep it in good condition.

DJ told me that she had much in common with the author when it came to being a foreigner in England, including being confused about words being used differently even though like Hopwood she also firmly believed she was speaking English. She was also terrified by the noise from unexpected fireworks on her first Guy Fawkes night in England, although unlike the author, wasn’t humiliated by the people around her as a result!

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Author, Book Review, DePree - Hopwood

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The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves

The Rising Tide is the second book I’ve read by Ann Cleeves featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope and I enjoyed it as much as I did the first, Harbour Street.

This murder mystery is set on Holy Island or Lindisfarne, a small tidal island off Northumberland in the north of England, which is accessed via a causeway that is covered by the North Sea during high tide. Finding that Holy Island and the causeway were real places, I immediately launched an investigation* to learn more. Holy Island appears to be one of the most interesting places in the world, one that I will likely never visit, but if you have been there, please tell me all about your experience! I learned that foolish motorists are rescued by the Coast Guard at a rate of one vehicle per month, after attempting to cross the causeway ahead of a rising tide. The actual island looks interesting too, and has a castle, a priory and is a bird-watchers’ and walkers paradise. For the religious, Holy Island is known as the Cradle of Christianity in northern England and southern Scotland, and walkers can make a pilgrimage across the tidal flats to the island, which I suspect is even more dangerous for those who misjudge the tides on foot than for vehicles whose drivers risk being swept away from the causeway.

But, back to the story. For over fifty years a group of school friends who bonded during a school outreach program on the island have returned every fifth year, to reconnect and re-hash old times. When Rick, a recently disgraced media personality was found hung in his room after the first night of this year’s get-together, Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope attended and established that he had been murdered. The rest of the group immediately became suspects, with a tell-all book that Rick had recently decided to write as a possible motive for his murder.

One murder was bad enough, but a second, earlier death of one of the gang, Isobel, who was drowned fifty years ago while crossing the causeway also began to look suspicious, despite Isobel’s death having been found to be accidental at the time. However, the members of the group, and their extended friends and families, which included their young teacher, someone’s ex-husband, someone else’s ex-wife and several other people all looked like murder suspects to me at one stage or another, especially as no one was willing to give up their secrets to Vera and her team.

The Rising Tide also featured Vera’s golden boy, Detective Joe Ashworth, along with bright-eyed and bushy-tailed DC Holly Clarke, who was jostling with Joe to become Vera’s favourite team member.

The unexpected ending caught me by surprise, much like the rising tide on the causeway catches out foolish motorists.

Although The Rising Tide is the tenth book to feature Vera, I had no trouble reading this as a stand-alone work. The only thing that I found jarring was the many unkind physical descriptions of this fabulous character, who was too-often described as fat and ugly, and a massive eater of all the wrong things. I wish the fictional Vera could have a poke back at the author, and let her know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that there is joy in eating the ‘wrong’ things that eaters of the ‘right’ things miss out on entirely.

Despite this, I’ll make a point of reading another Vera book sooner rather than later.

Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves

*I worked for someone thirty years ago who used the expression ‘launched an investigation’ whenever a mystery in his business needed to be cleared up, and the words still make me smile.

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Author, Book Review, Cleeves - Ann

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The Secret Library by Oliver Tearle

The Secret Library: A Book Lover’s Guide Through Curiosities of Literature by Oliver Tearle was full of interesting bookish snippets, causing me to stop reading every page or so to search the internet to learn more about something, beginning with what were called the more obscure of Aesop’s fables*, the fragments of Sappho’s poems that are all that are left of her work, and gazing at portraits of Lord Byron, and my goodness, he was a handsome man. I can easily see why everyone went mad over him!

As a result of reading this book I’ve added authors and books to my own wish list, including the Heptameron, which influenced Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The Heptameron contains seventy-two stories and was attributed to Queen Marguerite of Navarre who wrote this during the renaissance. I’ve also added Samuel Pepys diary and Margaret Cavendish, who wrote the genre-busting fiction during the 1600s to my list.

I learned that the first vampire story, titled The Vampyre, was written by Dr John William Polidori. He was Lord Byron’s doctor, and he wrote the story over the summer holiday in Geneva during which a story-telling competition was held between Mary Shelley and her gang. Funnily enough, Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein came to life during this holiday, too.

I was amused to learn that an editor at a dinner party convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write another Sherlock Holmes story, after his first story featuring the character wasn’t terribly successful. Oscar Wilde attended the dinner party too and he also agreed to write a novel for this same editor; his story became The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The book moved chronologically through the ages, ending with The Modern World. This section included a story about Anne Frank’s diary being rejected by ten publishers before being taken on for publication, the introduction of swear words to dictionaries and the importance of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, before finishing with the details of the first book ordered from Amazon.

The Secret Library: A Book Lover’s Guide Through Curiosities of Literature is best read a section at a time rather than all the way through at once, so you can enjoy and appreciate each bookish story. The style is conversational and friendly, and as I already mentioned, left me wanting to know more about a great many authors and their works.

*I was pleased to see I already knew of The Mouse and the Oyster and The Man With Two Mistresses, which were included in a lovely copy of Aesop’s Fables that Aunty G gave me as a child.

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Author, Book Review, Tearle - Oliver

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Love by Roddy Doyle

After hearing Roddy Doyle’s name constantly this year by other bloggers, I decided to jump on the bandwagon with Love, mostly because of the title. What’s not to like about Love?

When I turned to the page naming the author’s other books, the first one jumped out at me. While I’ve never read The Commitments, I adored the film and the music and couldn’t believe I’d never connected the writer with this film before.

Turning to the first page, however, my heart sank. Lots of dialogue, but no speech marks. Instead, Roddy Doyle used dashes to indicate speech. I was annoyed by the dashes for at least five sentences, then became so interested in what the characters were saying to each other that I forgot to be irritated.

The plot was straightforward. Two old friends, Davy and Joe met for dinner in Dublin then went on a pub crawl, getting drunker and drunker, talking the whole time and becoming more profane as the evening wore on.

Joe hogged the conversation, telling Davy that he left his wife a year ago, for his first love from forty years back. Davy had a lot going on too, but he wasn’t saying. Not because he couldn’t get a word in, he could (Davy was the narrator, after all), but he had been in love with Joe’s new missus way back when they were young, too.

There was a lot of dialogue in this story. Joe was like a teenage girl, wanting to explore every nuance in his history with Jess, telling Davy how and where he met had Jess again (at a school parent-teacher night, believe it or not), then rambling on about still loving his wife and despairing because his kids wouldn’t speak to him because he had left their mother. Davy and Joe also relived their glory days of mammoth pub crawls in their youth, when they had first met Jess at the George Hotel way-back-when.

I loved the first half of the story, but would liken this book to going out with friends who are on a bender when you don’t drink. The first half of the night is great fun, but the last half of the night is just indulging your friends in their repetitive, boring conversations that never get to the point, and wishing you were already tucked up in bed at home and asleep.

Davy and Joe must have gone to every pub in Dublin over the course of that one night of the story, but I was ready to go home at about 9.30pm. I think a reader who knows Dublin will love Love. I didn’t love it, but I liked it, and will look to read something else by Roddy Doyle in future.

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Author, Book Review, Doyle - Roddy

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Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish to English by Sophie Hughes is, I think, the only book I’ve read set in Mexico other than American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. The only other similarity I can find between the two stories is the brutality and violence that permeated through the life of the characters.

I found the first chapter engrossing. The words were lyrical, with an exotic otherness far more descriptive and elegant than is generally found in books written in English. An early sentence in that first chapter of Hurricane Season was a page and a half long; it ran along conversationally with the next sentence being another page and a half long. By the third sentence, which was also another page and a bit long, I no longer noticed the lengthy sentences because I had become so interested in the story.

Hurricane Season is set in a coastal Mexican village. The story began with children finding a murdered woman dumped in an irrigation channel, later, the woman was identified as the local witch. Local women had sought her out for years, seeking potions to make someone love them, or a way to prevent their husbands from visiting the whores out on the highway, or for something to expel the unwanted baby growing inside them.

Each of the eight chapters followed a different character, each of their secrets adding more to the reader’s knowledge of the witch, the lives of the people from her village and the characters of her murderers, but as the story continued, I became more and more uneasy with the increasing levels of violence and the depravity of various characters. The language became coarser as the story continued, far beyond the point of offensiveness, as misogynistic characters unleashed their hatred, drug-addicted characters unleashed their miseries, prostitutes unleashed their anger, children who had been groomed and sexually abused unleashed their distress, and so the story became heavier and more unbearable the further it went on.

I’m feeling conflicted writing this review, the language was evocative and lyrical yet at the same time, coarse and horrible, while the story itself was violent, brutal and absolutely frightening, with the poverty and exploitation and abuse of women and children being particularly horrendous.

Hurricane Season is an extraordinary book, but it won’t be for everyone and I wish I hadn’t read it.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

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Author, Book Review, Melchor - Fernanda

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